Chasing the scent of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Mirth, wherever it may lead.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Claim Your Consciousness--Clear Your Karma

by D.D. Delaney

(The following article was scheduled to appear in the Oct. 2, 2007, issue of Port Folio Weekly, the Hampton Roads, VA, newspaper of culture and opinion. But because of communication glitches beyond anyone's control it was never published. For this and other reasons, Mark Krueger, subject of the article, cancelled his Oct. 6 workshop at the Heritage Center in Virginia Beach, VA, and Hampton Roads seekers were deprived of his message. But I thought it worthwhile to publish the article here so at least the message would not be lost to posterity.--DDD.)

The edgiest astrologer on the internet, as he’s been called, is coming to the Heritage Center at the Oceanfront for a day-long seminar Oct. 6, when he promises to deliver with laser-like precision his prescription for surviving our times while having fun doing it.

Mark Krueger, whose weekly “Planet Visions Update” (at www.in2light.com) has consistently amused and intrigued me over several years, is something of cosmic entertainer, not only fashioning double and triple meanings from words he enjoys playing with but bending conventional thinking as well in a consistent refrain to readers to “claim your consciousness and clear your karma.”

How to do that will be explained at his seminar, “Karma, Astrology, and You.” But speaking by phone from Richmond last week, Krueger previewed what his brand of astrology is about.

“I’ve tasted it all,” he says, “read the Cayce books way back when. My teachers were (astrologer) Dane Rudhyar and Carl Jung, for the collective unconscious; also...Hindu and Buddhist (influences)—Sri Aurobindo, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Leslie Temple Thurston, Papaji, Gangaji, and what amounts to the Buddha, the Divine Mother, Shiva, Kali.... I have a strong background in feminism, radical politics, ecology—doing it all in search of my own being,” including “deep therapies, primal therapies, due diligence with psychologies, LSD, health food, the first waves of acupuncture.”

But, as he tells it, in one moment of one day—Jan. 1, 2000, when “I happened to be paying attention...I came to see that none of this stuff has ever relieved my suffering. Instantly, it was obvious—by claiming one’s own consciousness, one could clear one’s own karma. That’s been the core of my work ever since then. I do astrology to remember, claim, and clear.”

And that makes him, as he admits, “an odd astrologer. I don’t predict a person’s future, which I could do extremely accurately. All I do is advocate for people being their own being, playing with the dream rather than having the dream play them.”

Furthermore, he says—and he may be right—”I’m the only one on the planet saying this.”

“Karma,” for Krueger, “is simply the stories of the past which endlessly reproduce the self as stories of the present and the future. If you were beaten down as a kid, every manifestation to show up in your life, whatever’s around you, probably keep telling that story.”

But you only think these stories are you. “They are not you.” You are what you’ve always been, “your own being, your own consciousness, as you loop in a dream of it all built up in layers of beliefs, stories, identities to wrap around your being.”

So, “instead of looking for yourself through all the endless projections the dream machine conditions us in, just be yourself, then play with the projections, the house of mirrors, the movie, and enjoy yourself rather than trying to enjoy the dream, which always comes and goes and never delivers yourself to yourself.”

Astrology, then, “reveals the karmic patterns people are stuck in.” Assuming “the soul comes into the body when you take your first breath, a birth chart is like taking an MRI of what the hell you were thinking when you came here.”

If that sounds like reincarnation, it is. “When you land in a body,” he says, “you gotta go looking for your soul, and when you go back to soul land you go looking for a body.” Dying “is like a high, until it wears off and you go into a body again. "

Wisdom teachings from the past “only tell you that the material world is the dream, but what I’m saying, which is radical, is that the spiritual world, the whole bundle, the whole package is the dream.”

Even God. “Nothing wrong with God,” he says, “but God is just another story in the dream.”

“My only definition of suffering is endless searching for yourself,” which “people are realizing now. They’re finding that all the strategies—ALL the strategies—aren’t working any more. The question I ask is, ‘Are you tired yet?’ Everywhere I go, the answer is yes, but they’re not supposed to say that out loud, there’s a duty to feed the dream, get it to come true, which only makes the dream true and their own being false.”

But in “the extraordinary times we’re in, personally, collectively, planetarily, and galactically” we have the rare opportunity “to see through the whole dream. You don’t have to chop wood or carry water or sit on a damn cushion. No sitting in caves or covering up your crotch. Just relax. Then your life just comes and meets you, and you just pick and choose” what you want to experience, “enjoying yourself all along the way.”